The Relationship between Youth Entrepreneurship and the SME Success

Abstract

This research is driven by questions of “Why do many young entrepreneurs fail when starting up their businesses?”, “What is the relationship between youth entrepreneurship and success of SME entrepreneurs?” and “How can we help these youth entrepreneurs?”

There is no definite profile that defines a successful entrepreneur. Previous research indicates that successful entrepreneurs share a number of important entrepreneurial characteristics and personality traits that enable the germination of entrepreneurship. However there is little research on entrepreneurial personality trait – entrepreneurship relationship.

This research applies the behavioral mode in studying the entrepreneurial characteristics of youths attempting to set up SMEs. The research also uses a qualitative and quantitative mixed-methods research methodology.

The research commences by factorizing the entrepreneurship of successful SME Entrepreneurs. The narrative, in-depth, personal interviews were conducted on two groups of twenty successful SME Entrepreneurs and each respondent was requested to fill up the SME questionnaire to quantify the priorities of their businesses.

The comparison between the qualitative interview data on entrepreneurial characteristics and the quantitative survey data on SME Groups and the subsequently drawn ranking list has revealed high coherence between the important elements. The first finding “The relationship of the entrepreneurial elements with the success of the SME entrepreneur business start up” has been confirmed. From the ranking results, the research has also been able to conclude the top ten Successful SME ranking characteristics.

The second theme concerns the youth entrepreneurship surveys that collect the respondents’ entrepreneurial characteristics and grade the data set through the Youth Entrepreneurs Questionnaire (YEQ). Accurate representation of the potential youth entrepreneurs necessitates participation of the business school postgraduate students in the survey, so these were taken by three groups of MBA students, two groups from the City University of Hong Kong, and the third, from the SYS University of China. A total of 220 sets of valid survey data was collated through the computational data analysis process, the interviews found the top ten ranking elements characterizing youth entrepreneurship.

A comparison of SME ranking characteristics and the Youth Entrepreneurship rankings results, it was possible to construct the important findings that constituted the Similarities and Differences in Entrepreneurship between the Youth Entrepreneurs and the Successful SME Entrepreneurs.

In solving the problem of “How to help Youth Entrepreneurs improve their chances of success?” this research constructed a computational model “Entrepreneurial Analysis System” to develop the predictor “Youth Entrepreneurial Index (YEI)” for the quantitative measurement of entrepreneurship.

While the YEI does not push the youth to start their new businesses, it is a useful tool to find out which of these entrepreneurs is unsuitable or ill prepare for such ventures. It is an exploratory approach to improve the chances of success. The construction of the model “Entrepreneurial Analysis System” and the quantitative predictor (YEI) however, remain critical challenges to this research.

I conclude tht all research data is new, recent, and self-collected primary data and my research has achieved the target.

Date of Award	5 Sept 2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Leong Chye Andrew LIM (Supervisor)